Fernando Perez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Josiah Carlson wrote: > > Here's a perspective "from the trenches" as it were. > > > > I've been writing quite a bit of code, initially all in Python (27k > > lines in the last year or so). It worked reasonably well and fast. It > > wasn't fast enough. I needed a 25x increase in performance, which would > > have been easily attainable if I were to rewrite everything in C, but > > writing a module in pure C is a bit of a pain (as others can attest), so > > I gave Pyrex a shot (after scipy.weave.inline, ick). > > Would you care to elaborate on the reasons behind the 'ick'? I'm a big fan of > weave.inline and have used it very successfully for my own needs, so I'm > genuinely curious (as I tend to teach its use, I like to know of potential > problems I may not have seen).
1. Mixing multiple languages in a single source file is bad form, yet it seems to be encouraged in weave.inline and other such packages (it becomes a big deal when the handful of Python becomes 20+ lines of C). 2. I experienced some minor but annoying issues in regards to automatic type conversions (strings, mmaps, buffers, and arrays if I remember correctly, it has been since February or March). There were other things, but I'm not sure if I am remembering them correctly or not (I spent around 12 hours over two days wrestling with weave.inline, but in 10 minutes I was using Pyrex effectively). > I should also add that a while ago a number of extremely annoying spurious > recompilation bugs were finally fixed, in case this was what bothered you. > Those bugs (hard to find) made weave in certain cases useless, as it > recompiled everything blindly, thus killing its whole purpose. I was actually finding that weave wasn't recompiling /enough/. I'd change some source, and get old behavior. I'd delete the various cache files, then see the recompilation and new behavior. With Pyrex and a bit of magic, I get auto-recompilation (though will seriously consider switching to Pyximport as another suggested). It also seemed to have some issues with interactive sessions, but I may be misremembering. > Feel free to reply off-list if you feel this is not appropriate for > python-dev, > though I think that a survey of the c-python bridges may be of interest to > others. Agreed. I admit that some of my issues would likely be lesser if I were to start to use inline now, with additional experience with such things. But with a few thousand lines of Pyrex and C working right now, I'm hard pressed to convince anyone (including myself) that such a switch is worthwhile. - Josiah _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
